How to Stop Time

Bisbee, Arizona, 1926

It was August. I was in the living room of a small timber house on the edge of town, on assignment for Hendrich. Every eight years there was an assignment. That was the deal. You did the assignment and then you moved on to the next place and Hendrich helped you change your identity and kept you safe. The only time you were ever in danger was during the assignment itself. Though I had been lucky. I had done three assignments before this one and they had all been successful. In other words: I had managed to locate the albas in question and convince them to join the society. No violence had been necessary. No real test of character. But here, in Bisbee, everything changed. Here, I was about to find out who I was. And the lengths I would go to, to find Marion.

Even though it was now evening and the dark was quickly dissolving the red mountains outside the window, the heat was intense. It was like the burning air outside but concentrated, like someone had decided to squeeze all of the desert heat into that timber house.

Sweat dripped off my nose and onto the nine of diamonds.

‘Y’aint used to heat much, are ya? Where you been hiding? Alaska? You been gold digging up in Yukon?’ That was the skinny toothless one who asked that. The one with two fingers missing on his left hand. The one who went by the name of Louis. He took another slug of whisky and swallowed it down without a flinch.

‘Been hiding all over,’ I said. ‘I have to.’

Then the other one – Joe – the one who’d just surprised me with a royal flush, the larger, cleverer one, started to laugh ominously. ‘This is all very interessin’ an’ all, and we always appreciate suppin’ moonshine with strangers. ’Specially ones wi’ some green in their pockets. But y’aint from Cochise County. Can always tell. Just from your clothes. See, everyone round here has a taint to ’em. From the dust. From the mines. You don’t see no cotton that white ’round Bisbee. And look at your hands. Clean as snow.’

I looked down at my hands. I was very used to the sight of them, these days, from all the music I had been playing. I had taught myself piano. That is what I had done with the last eight years.

‘Hands are hands,’ I said pathetically.

We had been playing poker for over an hour. I had already lost a hundred and twenty dollars. I drank some more of the whisky. It felt like fire. Now was the time, I realised. Now I had to say what I had come here to say.

‘I know who you two are.’

‘Oh?’ said Joe.

A clock ticked. Outside, far away, something howled. A dog or a coyote.

I cleared my throat. ‘You are like me.’

‘Sure doubt that.’ Joe again, with a laugh as dry as the desert.

‘Joe Thompson, that’s your name, is it?’

‘What you diggin’ at, mister?’

‘Not Billy Stiles? Not William Larkin?’

Louis then sat up tall. His face hardened. ‘Who are you?’

‘I have been many people. Just like you. Now, what should I call you? Louis? Or Jess Dunlop? Or John Patterson? Or maybe Three-fingered Jack? And that’s just the start, no?’

Four eyes and two guns were now staring hard at me. Never seen anyone so quick on the draw as those two. It was them all right.

They pointed at the pistol I was carrying. ‘Place it on the table, nice and slow . . .’

I did so. ‘I’m not here for trouble. I’m here to keep you safe. I know who you are. I know at least some of the people you have been. I know you haven’t always been working in a copper mine. I know about the train you robbed at Fairbank. I know about the Southern Pacific Express you took for more than most can ever dream of. I know neither of you need to be mining for copper.’ Joe was clenching his jaw so hard I thought he was going to lose teeth, but I kept going. ‘I know the two of you were meant to have been shot twenty-six years ago in Tombstone.’ I dug in my pocket and pulled out the pictures Hendrich had got hold of. ‘And I know these photographs of you were taken thirty years ago, and you have hardly aged a day.’

They didn’t even break away to look at the photos. They knew who they were. And they knew I knew who they were too. I had to talk.

‘Listen, I’m not trying to get you into any trouble. I’m just trying to explain that it’s all right. There are lots of people like you. I don’t know your whole story, but you both look about the same age. I’m guessing you were born shortly after seventeen hundred. Now, I don’t know if during that time you have come into contact with other people with this condition, apart from each other, but I can assure you there are many of them. Many of us. Thousands, possibly. And our condition is dangerous. It has been called by a doctor in England, anageria. When it becomes public – either because we decide to tell people, or people find us out – then we are in danger. And the people we care for are in danger. We are either locked away in a madhouse, pursued and imprisoned in the name of science, or murdered by the servants of superstition. So, as I am sure you know, your lives are at risk.’

Louis scratched his stubble. ‘From this side of the gun, looks like you are the one whose life hangs in the breeze.’

Joe was frowning. ‘So what are you asking us, mister?’

A deep breath. ‘I’m just here with a proposition. Look, people here in Bisbee already have their suspicions about you. Word is leaking out. This is the age of photography now. Our past has evidence.’ As I was hearing myself, with fear slowly creeping into my voice, I realised how much I was simply parroting Hendrich. Everything I was saying was the kind of thing Hendrich said. There was something hollow to every word. ‘There’s a society, like a union, working for the collective good. We are trying to get every person with this condition, this condition they call anageria, to be part of the society. It helps people. It assists them, when they need to move on and begin being someone else. That help can be money, and it can be in the form of papers and documents.’

Joe and Louis exchanged thoughts with their eyes. Louis’ eyes were duller, less illuminated with intelligence. He looked dangerously stupid, but he was the more malleable one. The one most likely to be sold. Joe was the strong one, in body and mind. Joe was the one who held his Colt without a quiver.

‘How much money you talkin’?’ Louis asked as an insect buzzed around his head.

‘It depends on need. The society allocates budgets according to the requirements of each particular case.’ God, I really was starting to sound like Hendrich.

Joe shook his head. ‘Didn’t you hear the man, Louis? He’s tellin’ us to move out of Bisbee. And that just ain’t gonna work, see. We’ve got it good here. We have good relations with folk here. We done our roamin’, and I been all over this country since I got off the boat all those years ago. And I ain’t bein’ told to move.’

‘It will be best for you if you do. You see, the society says that after eight years—’

Joe sighed a sigh that was halfway to a growl. ‘The society says? The society says? We ain’t in no society and we ain’t ever gonna be in no society. You understand me?’

‘I’m sorry but—’

‘I wanna put a hole in that head of yours.’

‘Listen, the society have contacted the law officials. They know I am here. If you shoot me, you will be caught.’

They both laughed at this.

‘You hear that, Louis?’

‘I heard ’im all right.’

‘Best we explain to Mr Peter Whicheverhisnameis why the joke is funny.’

‘You can call me Tom. See, I’m like you. I’ve had many names.’

Joe ignored me completely and carried on with his train of thought. ‘It’s all right. I’ll do it. See, the joke is funny cos there ain’t no law that touches us ’round here. This here ain’t an ordinary town. We’ve been helping Sheriff Downey and old P.D. out for some time now.’

P.D. Phelps Dodge. I’d been given enough information about Bisbee to know that Phelps Dodge was the major mining company in the area.

‘In actual fact,’ Joe went on, ‘we helped them instigate the Bisbee deportation. You know about that, right?’

I knew something about it. I knew that, in 1919, hundreds of striking miners had been roughly kidnapped and deported out of town.

‘So comin’ here and talkin’ about propositions and your little union ain’t gonna sway us too much. The last union men we dealt with we kicked all the way to New Mexico, and we did it with the sheriff’s seal of approval . . . Now, you really do look hot and bothered. Let’s go for a little walk and cool your blood a little . . .’

It was dark now. Desert-dark.

The air was turning chill, but I was sweating and sore and aching and my whisky-sour mouth was as dry as the grave I had been digging for over an hour.

Bullets weren’t infections. They weren’t the plague or one of the other hundred or so illnesses albas were able to resist. As with ultimate old age, there was no immunity from a bullet. And I didn’t want to die. I had to stay alive for Marion. Hendrich had convinced me we were getting closer to finding her.

At least one of them had had their revolver fixed on me the whole time I’d been digging. This situation didn’t change as they beckoned me out of the hole. And all the time their two dark Saddlebred horses stayed nibbling and whispering at each other.

‘Now,’ said Joe, as I hauled myself out, making sure I kept hold of the shovel as I did so. I leaned on it, as a kind of resting aid. ‘We ain’t buryin’ your money with ya. Empty those pockets and place all you have on the ground.’

I knew this was the moment. The only one I would get. I gave a curious glance towards the horses, causing the men to do the same. By the time Joe’s cold hard eyes were back upon me, the shovel was swinging fast towards his face. He fell back, semi-conscious, losing his hold of the gun, which landed with a thud in the dust.

‘Kill ’im,’ slurred Joe.

Louis, the one I’d gambled on being a little more cowardly, a little slower on the trigger, fired a shot as I was scrambling for Joe’s gun. The noise echoed around the desert as I felt the pain in my back, near my right shoulder. But I had Joe’s gun and one good arm, and I turned and shot Louis in the neck and he fired again but only hit the night that time. Then I shot Joe a couple of times too and there was blood slick black in the dark, and somehow inside my pain I managed to kick and roll them into the grave I had dug and put the earth back on them. I slapped the rump of one of the horses, causing it to gallop away, before I hauled myself on the other one.

The pain was beyond anything I had known, but somehow I made it away and I kept going and I kept going and I kept going across the desert and over dry hills and mountains and past a large quarry that seemed to my delirious mind like the blackness of death itself calling me towards it like the River Styx. I resisted and the horse kept walking through that night until I reached Tucson as the morning sun slowly bled its light into the sky and I found the Arizona Inn where Agnes poured alcohol on my wound and I bit into a wet towel to mask my screams as she tweezered the bullet out of my flesh.

Los Angeles, 1926

My bullet wound was healing, but there was still pain in my shoulder. I was at the Garden Court Apartments and Hotel, on Hollywood Boulevard, in the restaurant they had there. All marble and columns and grandeur. A mesmerising-looking woman with dark painted lips and a ghostly pale face sat at a table not too far away, talking to two fawning men in business suits. It was Lillian Gish, the movie star. I recognised her from Orphans of the Storm, a film set during the French Revolution.

For a moment or two, I was entranced.

I had come to love the cinema during my time in Albuquerque, where I had been stationed for the last eight years. The way you could just sit on your own in the dark and forget who you were, just let yourself feel what the film was telling you to feel for an hour or so.

‘They have them all in here,’ Hendrich was explaining discreetly as he set about his halibut in shrimp sauce. ‘Gloria Swanson, Fairbanks, Fatty Arbuckle, Valentino. Just last week Chaplin was at this very table. In your seat. He just had the soup. That was his entire meal. Just soup.’

Hendrich grinned. I had never hated that grin until now. ‘What’s the matter, Tom? Is it the beef? It can be a little overdone.’

‘The beef is fine.’

‘Oh, so it’s about what happened in Arizona?’

I almost laughed at this. ‘What else would it be about? I had to kill two men.’

‘Quiet now. I doubt Miss Gish wants to hear such things. Discretion, Tom, please.’

‘Well, I don’t see why we had to do this in the restaurant. I thought you had an apartment upstairs.’

He looked confused. ‘I like the restaurant. It’s always good to be around people. Don’t you enjoy being around people, Tom?’

‘I will tell you what I don’t enjoy . . .’

He glided his hand through the air, as if inviting me through a door. ‘Please do,’ he said. ‘Tell me what you don’t enjoy. If that makes you happy.’

I leaned forward to whisper. ‘I don’t enjoy fleeing a murder scene on a horse with a bullet lodged in my shoulder. A bullet. And . . . and . . .’ I was losing my flow. ‘I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to kill them.’

He sighed philosophically. ‘What was it Dr Johnson said? He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man. Do you know what I think? I think you are finding yourself. You were lost. You didn’t even know who or what you were. You had no purpose. You were living in poverty. You were moping around, burning yourself to feel something. Now look. You have a purpose.’ He waited a beat or two. ‘This shrimp sauce is really divine.’

The waiter came over and poured some more wine. We concentrated on our food until he disappeared again. A piano started to play. Some of the diners leaned over the backs of their seats to have a look at the pianist for a moment or two.

‘I’m just saying I didn’t like it. Those men were never going to join the society. You should have known that. I should have been told that, Hendrich.’

‘Please, try to call me Cecil. They know me as Cecil here. My story is that I made my money in San Francisco. Property development. I helped rebuild the city. After the quake. Don’t I look like a Cecil? Call me Cecil. They’ll think I’m Cecil B. DeMille, I can make them a star. It might get me some action . . .’

He drifted off into more thought. ‘I love this town. They are all coming here now. All these young farm girls from South Dakota or Oklahoma or Europe. This city has always been the same apparently. In the Ice Age animals used to come and get stuck in the tar pits that looked like shimmering lakes and the smell of the meat would bring other animals there to be trapped in that thick black tar. Anyway, I’m a safe kind of predator. They think I’m past it at seventy-eight. Seventy-eight! Imagine that. At seventy-eight I was fucking my way around Flanders. I was incorrigible. The amount of marriage proposals I made. I was the Valentino of the Lowlands . . .’

I took a big gulp of wine. ‘I can’t do this, Hendrich, I can’t do it.’

‘Cecil, please.’

‘I am sorry I went to Dr Hutchinson. Seriously, I am. But I want my old life back. I just want to be me again.’

‘I am afraid that is, as they say, impossible. Time moves forwards. We have the luxury of time but we still can’t reverse it. We can’t stop it. We are one-way traffic, just the same as all these mayflies. You can’t simply cut away from the society any more than you can be unborn. You do understand that, don’t you, Tom? And what about your daughter, Tom? We are going to find her. We will.’

‘But you haven’t.’

‘Yet, Tom, we haven’t yet. I sense she is out there, Tom. I know she is out there. She is there, Tom.’

I said nothing. I was angry, yes, but as was so often the case with anger, it was really just fear projecting outwards. The society was nothing – it had no physical presence in the real world, there was no stone plaque outside a grand building announcing its existence. It was just Hendrich and the people who had faith in him. And yet . . . Hendrich was enough. His aptitude. Indeed, maybe it was that aptitude that caused him to reel me in again with just the right words. Maybe it wasn’t just words, either. Maybe he actually could sense she was out there.

But then a thought. ‘If your aptitude is so good, then why didn’t you know? Why didn’t you know they could have killed me?’

‘They didn’t kill you. If they had killed you then, yes, I would have made a terrible mistake. But the fact is that you are a survivor, and I knew that, and it has been proven. Obviously, we are all survivors. But you . . . I don’t know. There is something special about you. You have a desire to live. Most people who get to your age feel like everything is behind them. But when I look at you I see a thirst for the future, a yearning for it. For your daughter, yes, but for something else too. The great unknown.’

‘But what kind of life is it? Having to change who you are every eight years?’

‘You had to change who you were before. What is the difference?’

‘The difference is that I could decide. It was my life.’

He shook his head, and smiled solemnly. ‘No. You were in retreat. You were hiding from life. You were hiding, if I dare say, from yourself.’

‘But that’s what the society is for, isn’t it? To hide?’

‘No, Tom, no. You misunderstand everything. Look at us. In the centre of the most famous restaurant in a sunlit city everyone wants to visit. We are not hiding. We are not tucked away in St Albans pulling metal out of a forge. The aim of the society is to provide a structure, a system, which enables us to enhance our lives. You do the occasional favour, a spot of recruitment, and you get to live a good life. And this is how you thank me.’

‘I have just spent eight years on a farm in Albuquerque with nothing but three cows and some cacti for company. It seems the society works better for some than it does for others.’

Hendrich shook his head. ‘I have a letter for you, from Reginald Fisher. You remember? The man you recruited in Chicago?’

He handed me the letter and I read it. It was a long letter. The one line that stood out was this one, near the end. I would have betrayed God to finish myself if you had never come and seen me, but I feel so happy now, knowing I am not a freakish specimen of humanity, but part of a family.

‘All right, Arizona was a mistake. But not everything has been. Lives are lost in wars but it doesn’t mean they shouldn’t ever be fought. You had a piano, Tom. Did you play it?’

‘Five hours a day.’

‘So how many instruments can you play now?’

‘Around thirty.’

‘That’s impressive.’

‘Not really. Most of them no one wants to hear any more. It’s hard to play Gershwin on a lute.’

‘Yes.’ Hendrich ate the last of his fish. Then he stared at me earnestly. ‘You are a murderer, Tom. Without the society’s protection you would be in a very vulnerable place right now. You need us. But I don’t want you to stay out of sheer necessity, Tom . . . I hear you, I hear you. I do. And I will never forget the people whose lives you have saved by bringing them into the society. So, from now on I am going to be a little more considerate of your needs. I am going to allocate a few more resources to finding Marion. We’ve got some new people. Someone in London. Someone in New York. One in Scotland. Another in Vienna. I’ll get them working on it. And, of course, I will fund those needs. I am going to listen. I am going to help you as much as I can. I want you to thrive, Tom. I want you to find not just Marion but the future you are waiting for . . .’

A group of four men entered the room and were escorted to a table. One of them had the most recognisable face on the planet. It was Charlie Chaplin. He spotted Lillian Gish and went over and spoke to her, his calm expression punctuated by the occasional quick nervous smile. She laughed gracefully. I had breathed the same air as Shakespeare, and now I was breathing the same air as Chaplin. How could I be ungrateful?

‘We are the invisible threads of history,’ Hendrich told me, as if reading my mind. Chaplin saw us looking and tipped an invisible bowler hat in our direction.

‘See. Told you. He loves this place. Must be the soup. Now, what do you want to do with your life?’

I considered the attention Chaplin was getting, and couldn’t think of a greater nightmare. Then, as I continued to contemplate the question I stared at the pianist, in his white dinner jacket, closing his eyes and drifting away, note by note, bar by bar, unnoticed except by me.

‘That,’ I said, nodding in the pianist’s direction. ‘That is what I want to do.’

London, now

‘But why couldn’t the League of Nations stop Mussolini from entering Abyssinia?’

Aamina is in the front row. Serious, frowning, alert, holding a pencil, she is wearing a T-shirt that says ‘Proud Snowflake’.

I am giving a lesson on the causes of the Second World War, trying to go back from 1939 through the 1930s, talking about Italy taking over Abyssinia, now Ethiopia, in 1935, as well as Hitler’s rise in 1933, the Spanish Civil War and the Great Depression.

‘Well, they tried, but in a really half-hearted way. Economic sanctions, but nothing that was majorly enforced. But the thing is, at the time, a lot of people didn’t realise what they were dealing with. You see, when you look at events in history there is a two-way perspective. Forwards and back. But at the time everything is one way. No one knew where fascism was heading.’

The lesson is going okay and my headache isn’t too bad – I think having made peace with Camille helped – but maybe because of this I slip into a kind of autopilot. I am not really thinking about what I am saying.

‘The news about Abyssinia felt like a real turning point, though. It made people realise something was happening. Not just with Germany but Italy too. With the world order. I remember reading a newspaper on the day Mussolini declared victory and I . . .’

Fuck.

I stop.

Realise what I have said.

Aamina, sharp as her pencil, also notices. ‘You said that as if you were there,’ she says.

A couple of other pupils nod in agreement.

‘No. I wasn’t there, but I felt I was. That’s the thing with history. You inhabit it. It’s another present . . .’

Aamina makes an amused face.

I continue. I cover my tracks, I think. It is a pretty minor mistake to make and yet it is the kind of mistake I never used to make.

During the break I see Camille chatting to someone, out in the corridor. Leaning against some pupil artwork inspired by Rio’s favelas, which looks very bright and Fauvist and late nineteenth century.

She is talking to Martin. The hopeless music teacher. Martin is wearing black jeans and a black T-shirt. He has a beard and longer hair than the average male teacher. I have no idea what they are talking about, but he is making Camille laugh. I feel a strange unease. And then I walk past and Martin sees me first and smirks at me, as if I amuse him. ‘Hi, Tim. You look a bit lost. Did they give you a map?’

‘Tom,’ I say.

‘You what, mate?’

‘My name’s Tom. It isn’t Tim. It’s Tom.’

‘All right, mate. Easy mistake.’

Camille is smiling at me. ‘How was your lesson?’ she asks, her eyes on me like a detective. A smiling detective but still a detective.

‘Fine,’ I say.

‘Listen, Tom, every Thursday a few of us go to the Coach and Horses for a couple of drinks. We meet at seven. Me, Martin, Isham, Sarah . . . You should come along. Tell him, Martin.’

Martin shrugs. ‘It’s a free world. Yeah, knock yourself out.’

Of course, there is only one answer I should give. No. But I glance at Camille and find myself saying, ‘Yeah, okay. Coach and Horses, seven. Sounds good.’

An interlude about the piano

I moved from place to place and from time to time like an arrow immune to gravity.

Things did improve for a little while.

My shoulder healed.

I went back to London. Hendrich set me up as a hotel pianist in London. Life was good. I drank cocktails and flirted with elegant women in beaded dresses and then went out into the night to dance to jazz with playboys and flapper girls. It was the perfect time for me, where friendships and relationships were expected to be intense and burn out in fast gin-soaked debauchery. The Roaring Twenties. That’s what they say now, isn’t it? And they did kind of roar, compared to the times before. Of course, previous London decades had been noisy – the bellowing 1630s, for instance, or the laughing 1750s – but this was different. For the first time ever, there was always a sound, somewhere in London, that wasn’t quite natural. The noise of car engines, of cinema scores, of radio broadcasts, the sound of humans overreaching themselves.

It was the age of noise, and so suddenly playing music had a new importance. It made you a master of the world. Amid the accidental cacophony of modern life to be able to play music, to make sense out of noise, could briefly make you a kind of god. A creator. An orderer. A comfort giver.

I enjoyed the role I was in, during this time. Daniel Honeywell, born in London, but who had been tinkling the ivories for upper-class tourists and émigrés on ocean liners since the Great War. Slowly, though, a melancholy set in. At the time I thought it was another episode of personal melancholy, the futility of loving a woman who had died so long ago. But I think it was also a product of being in tune with the times.

I wanted to do something. I was fed up of simply doing things to help myself. I wanted to do something for humanity. I was a human after all and my empathy was for other human beings, not just those with the curse – or the gift – of hyperlongevity. ‘Time guilt’, that’s what Agnes called it, when I chatted with her about it. She came to see me in London, towards the end of my eight years. She had been living in Montmartre. She had lots of stories. She was still fun.

‘I feel a sense of dread,’ I told her, her feet resting on my stomach, as we smoked cigarettes in bed in my Mayfair apartment. ‘I keep having nightmares.’

‘Have you been reading Mr Freud?’

‘No.’

‘Well, don’t. It will make you feel worse. Apparently we are not in control of ourselves. We are ruled by the unconscious parts of our psyche. The only truth we can hope to find about ourselves is in our dreams. He says that most people don’t want to be free. Because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.’

‘I think that Freud has clearly never had to change his identity every eight years for ever.’

Then we went on what Agnes called an ‘adventure’ – a mission that Hendrich had given us via telegraph. It was one we were going to go on together. We drove in a car up to Yorkshire. In the bleak countryside at a grim gothic mental asylum called the High Royds Hospital, a woman had been locked up for telling people the truth of her condition. We kidnapped her from the grounds. Agnes held the chloroform handkerchief over the faces of three members of staff, and then had to do the same to poor Flora Brown, who was understandably frightened by the appearance of two strangers with their faces wrapped in scarves.

Anyway, we carried her out of there and escaped quite easily, and, for whatever reason – the hospital’s embarrassment? the total lack of care for their patients? the failure of the local authorities to check records? – the incident was never reported in the press. If it had been, we’d have been safe, Hendrich would have seen to that, but it wasn’t, and I have always found that terribly sad.

Anyway, Flora was young. She was only eighty years old. She looked seventeen or eighteen. She was a bewildered stuttering damaged thing when we found her, but the society saved her; it really did, the way it saved many others. She had honestly thought she was mad, and to discover her own sanity made her weep with relief. She left for Australia with Agnes and started a new life. Then she moved to America and started another one. But the point was: the society was doing good. It had saved people. Flora Brown. Reginald Fisher. And many, many more. And maybe myself, too. I realised Hendrich was right. There was a meaning and purpose to all this. I might not always have believed in him, but – most of the time – I believed in the work.

I didn’t want to go back to London. I told Hendrich by telegraph that I had arranged it with my employers Ciro’s to work in their sister restaurant, in a hotel in Paris. So, I went to live in Montmartre, in the apartment where Agnes had been living. I was her ‘brother’. There was a brief moment we overlapped. I mention this because we had a very interesting conversation. She told me that, as you get older, somewhere around the mid-millennium mark, albas develop a deep insight.

‘What kind of insight?’

‘It’s incredible. Like a third eye. The feeling for time becomes so profound that inside a single moment you can see everything. You can see the past and the future. It is as though everything stops and, for just that moment, you know how everything is going to be.’

‘And is that good? It sounds horrifying.’

‘It’s not good or horrifying. It just is. It’s just an incredibly powerful feeling, neither good or bad, where everything becomes clear.’

The conversation stayed with me, long after she left. I craved such clarity at a time when I could hardly understand my present, let alone my future.

I eventually moved to Montparnasse and wrote a lot of poetry. I once wrote a poem in the cemetery there, leaning against Baudelaire’s headstone, and I played the piano every night and made the most superficial acquaintances with poets and painters and artists that often only lasted a night.

I anchored myself in music. As well as Ciro’s, I sometimes worked at a jazz club called Les Années Folles. I had been playing the piano near-continuously for three decades now and it had become natural to me. Piano could carry a lot. Sadness, happiness, idiotic joy, regret, grief. Sometimes all at the same time.

I gained a routine. I would start my day with a Gauloise then I would head to Le Dôme Café on the Boulevard du Montparnasse and have a pastry (it was usually around midday by the time I was out of the apartment). I sometimes had a coffee. More often I had cognac. Alcohol became more than just alcohol. It felt like freedom. Drinking wine and cognac was almost a moral duty. And I drank and drank and drank, until I almost convinced myself I was happy.

But there was a sense of something tipping out of balance. The times seemed out of joint. There was too much decadence. Too much intensity. Too much change. Too much happiness juxtaposed with too much misery. Too much wealth next to too much poverty. The world was becoming faster and louder, and the social systems were becoming as chaotic and fragmented as jazz scores. So there was a craving, in some places, for simplicity, for order, for scapegoats and for bully-boy leaders, for nations to become like religions or cults. It happened every now and then.

It seemed, in the 1930s, that the whole course of humanity was at stake. As it very often does today. Too many people wanted to find an easy answer to complicated questions. It was a dangerous time to be human. To feel or to think or to care. So, after Paris I stopped playing the piano. And I didn’t play it again. The piano had been taking it out of me. I often wondered if I’d ever play it again. And I don’t know if I ever would have, if I hadn’t been sitting next to Camille when the opportunity arose.

London, now

‘I like the old stuff,’ Martin is saying, nodding at his own wisdom, before taking a sip of his lager. ‘Hendrix mainly, but also Dylan, The Doors, the Stones. You know, stuff before we were born. Before everything was commercialised.’

I don’t like Martin. The great thing about being in your four hundreds is that you can get the measure of someone pretty quickly. And every era is clogged with Martins, and they are all dickheads. I can remember a Martin called Richard who used to stand right near the stage at the Minerva Inn in Plymouth in the 1760s, shaking his head at every tune I played, whispering to the poor prostitute on his knee about my terrible taste in music, or shouting out the name of a Broadside ballad better than the one I was playing.

Anyway, so here we all are, seated around a table in the Coach and Horses. The table is small, a dark wood, the colour and feel of the back of a lute, and barely contains the assortment of drinks and crisps and peanuts which we huddle around. The atmosphere of the pub is quiet and civilised, although maybe that is because I now have the riotous stinking brawl-pit of the Minerva Inn in my mind.

‘Oh, me too,’ says Isham. ‘But then all geography teachers like old rock.’

Everyone eye-rolls Isham’s attempt at a joke, even Isham.

‘But also a bit of eighties hip-hop,’ Martin has to add. ‘De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, PE, NWA, KRS-One . . .’

‘Anything modern?’ Camille asks him.

He takes a quick micro-glance at her chest, then up to her eyes. ‘Not really. No one you’d have heard of.’

‘That is possibly true. After all, I am from France. We don’t have music there. Literally none.’ Her gentle sarcasm is lost, or maybe he didn’t hear her, but I like it.

‘Okay,’ Martin says. ‘What are you into?’

‘My tastes are quite eclectic, I suppose. Beyoncé. Leonard Cohen. Johnny Cash. Bowie. Bit of Jacques Brel. But Thriller is my favourite album of all time. And “Billie Jean” is the best pop song ever written.’

‘“Billie Jean”?’ I say. ‘It’s a great song.’

Martin turns to me. ‘What about you, then? You into music?’

‘A little.’

His eyes widen, waiting for me to clarify.

‘Do you play anything, music wise?’ Camille asks me, frowning, as if there is more to the question than it seems.

I shrug. It would be easy to lie, but it falls out of me. ‘Bit of guitar, little bit of piano . . .’

‘Piano?’ Camille’s eyes widen.

Sarah, the sports teacher, in a capacious Welsh rugby shirt, points over to the corner of the room. ‘They’ve got a piano in here, you know. They let people play.’

I stare at the piano. I had been trying so hard to act like an ordinary mayfly that I hadn’t even noticed it when I’d walked in.

‘Oh yes, you can give it a tinkle,’ says the barman, a lanky twentysomething with a weak wispy beard, who is clearing our glasses away.

I begin to panic, the way anyone might panic when being offered a drug they had fought to give up. ‘No, I’m fine.’

Martin, sensing my awkwardness in front of Camille, pushes it a little further. ‘No, go on, Tom. I had a go last Thursday. Have a go.’

Camille looks at me sympathetically. ‘It isn’t compulsory. It’s not an initiation ritual. He doesn’t have to if he doesn’t want to.’

‘Well,’ I find myself saying, ‘it’s been a while.’

I don’t want her to pity me, so maybe it is for that reason that I stand up and walk over to the scratched and well-worn upright piano, passing the only other customers in the place – three grey-haired friends staring in the timeless mute sorrow of old men at their half-drunk pints of bitter.

I sit down on the stool and the room falls quiet with expectation. Well, quiet, except for a little snorted giggle from Martin.

I stare down at the keys. I haven’t played the piano since Paris. Not properly. That was the best part of a century ago. There was something about the piano, compared to the guitar. It demanded more of you. It cost too much emotion.

I have no idea what to play.

I push up my sleeves.

I close my eyes.

Nothing.

I play the first thing that comes to mind.

‘Greensleeves’.

I am in a pub in East London and playing ‘Greensleeves’ on a piano. Martin’s laughter flaps into my head but I keep going. ‘Greensleeves’ blurs into ‘Under the Greenwood Tree’, which makes me pine for Marion, and so I move on to a bit of Liszt’s Liebestraum No. 3. And by the time that I reach Gershwin’s ‘The Man I Love’ Martin isn’t laughing and I am on my own inside the music. I feel exactly how I used to feel, playing in Paris at Ciro’s. I remember, in short, what the piano can do.

But then other memories rise up, and my head pounds as my mind goes into a kind of cramp of emotion.

When I eventually stop I turn to look at the group. Mouths are open. Camille leads a little round of applause. Even the three old men and bar staff join in.

Martin mumbles the word ‘Greensleeves’. Isham tells me: ‘That was epic!’ Sarah tells Martin: ‘You might be out of a job!’ Martin tells Sarah to fuck off.

I sit on my stool next to Camille.

‘When you played I really had that feeling again. Like I’d seen you playing before. It was like déjà vu or something.’

I just shrug. ‘Well, they say déjà vu is a real thing.’

‘A symptom of schizophrenia,’ says Martin.

‘But truly,’ Camille says, her hand touching the back of mine, then retreating before anyone sees. ‘That was amazing – si merveilleux.’

And I feel a brief but intense surge of desire. I haven’t truly lusted after another human being for centuries, but when I look at Camille, when I hear her kind, strong voice, when I see the delicate creases around her eyes, when I feel the skin of her hand against the skin of mine, when I look at her mouth, my mind switches to what it would be like to be with her, to lose my way with her, to whisper longings into her ear, to devour and be devoured. To wake up in the same bed and talk and laugh and be in comfortable silence with her. To give her breakfast. Toast. Blackcurrant jam. Pink grapefruit juice. Maybe some watermelon. Sliced. On a plate. She would smile, and I see it in my mind, the smile, and I would dare to feel happy with another human being.

This is what playing the piano does.

This is the danger of it.

It makes you human.

‘Tom?’ she says, breaking my reverie. ‘Would you like another drink?’

‘No thanks,’ I say, embarrassed, as though I am a book left open with every secret written on the page for all to see. ‘I think I’ve probably had enough.’

Isham gets his phone out. ‘Anyone want to see the scan?’ he asks. ‘It’s 3D.’

‘Ooh,’ says Camille, ‘me!’

Isham and his wife are expecting a baby. We lean in around the moving ultrasound image. I can remember when the concept of ultrasound was first spoke of in the 1950s. It still, even now, feels like the future. Though it is a strange kind of future that makes you see a potential human as the delicate primitive clay-like being it is. Like watching a half-made sculpture seeking definition.

I notice, for a second, that Camille is staring at the scar on my arm. I pull down my sleeves, self-conscious.

‘We don’t know the sex yet. Zoë wants it to be a surprise.’

He has a tear glistening in his eye.

‘I’d say it’s a boy,’ says Martin, and he points to the screen.

‘That is not a penis,’ Isham says.

Martin shrugs. ‘It’s a penis.’

I stare down at the screen, and I remember what it felt like when Rose told me she was pregnant. I wonder what Rose would have made of sonograms. And whether she’d have wanted to find out the gender. And I sit back in my chair and don’t say much after that. A guilt takes over me. The guilt of desiring someone who isn’t Rose.

So ridiculous.

And I drift away again, forgetting my headache, forgetting this is the Coach and Horses, and imagining it is the Boar’s Head in Eastcheap, and that I could step outside into the night and walk back through the dark narrow streets to reach Rose and Marion and a version of me I had abandoned for centuries.

London, 1607–1616

In 1607 I was twenty-six years old.

I obviously didn’t look twenty-six but I was looking a fraction older than I had done back when I’d worked on Bankside. When I had first become aware of my difference I thought that was it, I thought my physical being was frozen in time, but then, slowly, very slowly, things happened. For instance, hair. My crotch, chest, underarms and face were growing more hairs than they had done before. My voice, which had broken when I was twelve, became deeper still. My shoulders broadened a little. My arms found it easier to carry washing water back from the well. I gained greater control over my erections. And my face, according to Rose, became more like the face of a man. I was becoming so much more like a man that Rose suggested we get married, and we did so, in a small parentless wedding, with Grace as our witness.

Grace was now married too. She had become happily betrothed to her precise opposite – a shy, God-fearing, flush-cheeked shoemaker’s apprentice called Walter – at the age of seventeen and she now lived with him in a tiny cottage in Stepney.

After we married, Rose and I moved too. The reason for this was quite simple. The longer we stayed in one place, the more dangerous it became. Rose’s idea was to head further out, to one of the villages, but I knew of the potentially perilous consequences of this, so I suggested we do the opposite. I suggested we go and live inside the walls, go where we could disappear into the safety of crowds, and so we moved to Eastcheap, and life was good for a while.

Yes, there was rot and rats and misery all around us, but we had each other. The problem was, of course, that, although I was ageing, I wasn’t ageing at the same speed as Rose. She was now twenty-seven years old, and looked it. While I was, gradually, starting to look young enough to be her son.

I said to people I was eighteen, which I could just about get away with, at least at the Boar’s Head Inn, where I had started to play most nights of the week, but by the time Rose came to me and told me she wasn’t bleeding, and that she thought she was pregnant, I had already felt like I was endangering her. Anyway, it was true. And I had no idea if the news was wonderful or devastating. She was pregnant. We had hardly enough money to feed ourselves, and now there was going to be a third mouth to feed.

Of course, there were other worries too. I worried something would happen to Rose. After all, I had heard of so many women dying during childbirth that it seemed a wholly ordinary occurrence. So I kept the windows closed against the cold. And I prayed for God to protect her.

And, for once in my life, nothing terrible happened.

What happened was this. We had a daughter. We called her Marion.

I would hold her in my arms while she was still wrapped in swaddling bonds, and I used to sing to her in French to calm her when she cried, and it generally seemed to work.

I loved her, instantly. Of course, most parents love their children instantly. But I mention it here because I still find it a remarkable thing. Where was that love before? Where did you acquire it from? The way it is suddenly there, total and complete, as sudden as grief, but in reverse, is one of the wonders about being human.

She was small, though. Obviously babies, as a rule, are small and delicate but back in those days the delicacy came with an extra edge.

‘Will she last, Tom?’ Rose used to say, when Marion was asleep and we watched her, seeking the comfort of her every breath. ‘God won’t take her, will He?’

‘No. She’s as healthy as a goose,’ I used to say.

Rose obsessed over memories of Nat and Rowland, her dead brothers. Any time Marion coughed – or even made any kind of noise that could be loosely interpreted as one – Rose would become ashen and declare, ‘That’s how it began with Rowland!’

At night she would watch the stars, not quite knowing what she was watching them for, but knowing that our fates – and the fate of Marion – were written on them.

All of this anxiety took its toll on Rose, who became very quiet and withdrawn in the following months. She looked pale and tired, and kept blaming herself for being a terrible mother, which she wasn’t at all. I wonder now if it was a form of postnatal depression. She was always up before it was light. And became more religious than she had ever been, saying prayers even as she held Marion. She lost her appetite, eating barely more than a few mouthfuls of pottage a day. She never worked now, or sold fruit at the market, as Marion had taken over her days, and I think she missed the company and liveliness of the time, so I encouraged Grace to come and see her, which she did from time to time, bringing baby clothes or calming ointments from the apothecary, along with her earthy humour.

We had lovely neighbours, Ezekiel and Holwice, who’d had nine children of their own, five of whom were still alive, and so Holwice – although in her fifties, worked now as a wool-walker at the watermill – had lots of childcare advice. It was the usual kind of stuff. Open the windows to ward away bad spirits. No bathing. A dab of breast milk and rosewater solution on the baby’s forehead to aid sleep.

But Rose thought all manner of things could endanger little Marion (and she was, always, little, which added to Rose’s concern). She would get cross with herself, or me, for instance, if either of us scratched our head.

‘It is a dirty habit, Tom. It could make her sick!’

‘I am sure it won’t.’

‘You must stop it, Tom. You must stop it. And you mustn’t belch around her.’

‘I didn’t know I did belch around her.’

‘And you must wipe your mouth after drinking ale. And be quiet when you come home at night. You always wake her.’

‘I am sorry.’

Other times, when Marion was asleep, Rose would just burst out crying for no apparent reason, and ask me to hold her, which I did. Often, when I came back from a night playing music, I would hear her tears as I entered the door.

Anyway, I don’t know why I dwell on this. This was only a matter of months. And Rose returned back to her old self by the end of summer. I suppose I am relaying it because it added to my guilt. I knew, deep down, that I was part of the strain on things. Rose had, of the two of us, been the strong one, the organiser and initiator, the one who always knew what was best to do for the both of us. And it was her strength that had, obviously, enabled Rose to marry me, knowing all that she knew.

But, out of sorts, her doubts rose up. Even if Marion survived infancy, and childhood, what then? What would happen when she looked older than her father? The questions, we both knew, would breed like rabbits.

I had a new worry too. While Rose stayed concerned that Marion would die, or otherwise overtake me, I worried with an equal intensity that she wouldn’t. What I mean is, I worried she would be like me. I worried she would be abnormal. That she would reach the age of thirteen and then stop getting any older. I worried that Marion would face the same problems – or even worse ones – for I knew (of course I knew) that women were the ones who had to die at the bottom of rivers to prove their innocence.

I couldn’t sleep at night, however much ale I had drunk (and the quantity was increasing at a daily rate). I kept thinking of Manning, still alive, probably still in London. Though we never encountered him, I often had the sense of him. I sometimes imagined I could feel his closeness, as if his malevolent essence was contained in shadows or cesspits or the single hand of a church clock.

Superstition was rising everywhere. People like, occasionally, to see human life as a generally smooth upwardly sloping line towards enlightenment and knowledge and tolerance, but I have to say that has never been my experience. It isn’t in this century and it wasn’t in that one. The arrival of King James onto the throne let superstition off the lead. King James, who not only wrote Daemonologie but also asked puritanical translators to refashion the Bible, was a boost for intolerance.

The lesson of history is that ignorance and superstition are things that can rise up, inside almost anyone, at any moment. And what starts as a doubt in a mind can swiftly become an act in the world.

And so our fears grew. One night in the Boar’s Head, a fight started when a group of men turned on one of their members and accused him of devil worship. Another night I got speaking to a butcher who refused to take any pork from a certain farmer, on account that he believed all his pigs were ‘dark spirits’ and their meat could corrupt the soul. He gave no evidence for this but he believed it with a passion, and it caused me to remember the case of a pig in Suffolk that had once stood trial and had been burned at the stake on account of being a demon.

We never went to the Globe to see Macbeth, for obvious reasons, but it was no coincidence that this tale of politics and supernatural malevolence was the most popular and talked-about piece of entertainment at the time. I wonder, now, if Shakespeare would have been so kind to me. And if, in this new environment, he believed the death of Henry Hemmings had been justified. But I also had more specific worries.

There was a man at the end of our street, a smartly dressed man who read aloud emphatically enunciated dialogues from Daemonologie, alongside extracts from the King’s Bible. Also, by the time Marion was four, even our once kindly neighbours, Ezekiel and Holwice, were beginning to give me funny looks. I don’t know if this was because they had noticed I wasn’t ageing, or if it was more that the age difference between Rose and me was starting to look a little wide. She seemed a good decade older than me.

And even though we never saw Manning again, I would hear his name. Once, in the street, a woman I had never seen before came up to me and stuck her finger in my chest.

‘Mr Manning told me about you. He told everyone about you . . . They say you have a child. They should have smothered her at birth, to be safe.’

Another time, while Rose was out alone with Marion she was spat at, for living with the ‘enchanter’.

Marion, now a girl, was aware of such things. She was an intelligent, sensitive child, and seemed to carry a sadness around with her a lot of the time. She cried after that incident. And she would fall very quiet if she heard us talk, however quietly, about our worries.

Slowly, and for her sake, we began to change the way we lived. We deliberately made sure we were never out together. We tried to stop questions when they arose. And we managed it.

Marion, being a girl, and not being nobility, did not go to school. Yet we still thought it important for her to read, to be able to broaden her mind and give her places in her thoughts to hide inside. Reading was a rare skill, in those days, but was one I possessed. And, as I had grown up with a mother who could read (albeit in French) I saw nothing strange in the idea of a girl reading.

She was, it turned out, an extremely gifted and curious reader. We possessed only two books but she adored them. She could read Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene by the age of six, and by the age of eight could quote Michel de Montaigne – I had an English translation of his essays that I had acquired years before at Southwark’s Wednesday market. The book was damaged – the pages unfixed from the spine – and I’d bought it for two pennies. She would see, for instance, her mother touch my hand and say, ‘If there is such a thing as good marriage, it is because it resembles friendship rather than love.’ Or, on questioning why she looked so sad, she would remark, ‘My life has been full of terrible misfortunes, most of which never happened.’

‘That’s Montaigne, isn’t it?’

And she would give the tiniest nod. ‘I quote others only in order the better to express myself,’ she’d say, which was itself, I sensed, another quote.

Then one day she read something else.

You see, she sometimes went outside on her own in the morning to play. And one day she came in, while I was learning a new lute song – ‘I Saw My Lady Weepe’ by John Dowland – and she looked a little like someone had slapped her in the face.

‘What is it, sweetheart?’

She seemed out of breath. It took her a moment. She was frowning at me, with an intensity and seriousness that seemed beyond her age. ‘Are you Satan, Father?’

I laughed. ‘Only in the mornings.’

She wasn’t in joking mood, so I quickly added, ‘No, Marion. What would make you ask such a thing?’

And then she showed me.

Someone had scraped the words ‘Satan Resides Here’ on our door. It was a horrifying thing to see, but more horrifying to know Marion had seen it too.

And when Rose saw it she knew, absolutely, what needed to be done.

‘We need to leave London.’

‘But where would we go?’

That seemed, to Rose, to be a secondary question. She was resolute. ‘We need to start again.’

‘To do what?’

She pointed at the lute leaning beside the door.

‘People’s ears like music in other places.’

I stared at the lute. At the darkness of the small holes amid the twisting decoration of the wood. I imagined, ridiculously, a world inside there. Deep in the shell of the lute. Where some miniature version of ourselves could live, safe and invisible and unharmed.

London, now

I had brought my lute in for year nine. I am holding it, leaning against my desk.

‘This was hand-crafted way over four hundred years ago in France. The design is a little more intricate than English lutes of that period.’

‘So that’s what guitars used to look like in the olden days?’ wonders Danielle.

‘Lutes aren’t technically guitars. They’re obviously close cousins but a lute has a lighter kind of sound. Look at the shape of it. Like a teardrop. And look at the depth. Look at the back. It’s called a shell. The strings are made of sheep’s intestines. They give it a very precise perfect sound.’

Danielle makes a disgusted face.

‘This was the instrument once upon a time. This was the keyboard and electric guitar in one. Even the queen had one. But playing music in public was a bit vulgar so that was generally left to the lower orders.’

I play a few notes. The first bars of ‘Flow My Tears’. They seem unimpressed.

‘That was a big tune, back in the day.’

‘Was that from the eighties?’ wonders Marcus, the boy with the gold watch and the complicated hairstyle who sits next to Anton.

‘No, a little earlier.’

But that made me remember something.

I start to play a chord – E minor – and keep going at it in short stabs before switching to A minor.

‘I know this song,’ says Danielle. ‘My mum loves this.’

Anton is smiling and nodding his head. And then I start singing the words to the song, to ‘Billie Jean’, in a slightly ridiculous falsetto.

The class is laughing now. Some of them are singing along.

And then, because of the commotion, Camille and her class of year sevens, on their way outside for one of her French lessons on the playing field, stop to watch me. Camille opens the door to hear.

She is clapping in time from behind the glass. She smiles and closes her eyes and sings the chorus.

And then her eyes open and are on me and I feel happily terrified or fearfully happy, and now even Daphne is out in the corridor so I stop playing. And the kids release a collective moan. And Daphne says, ‘Don’t stop for me. There’s always time for a lute rendition of Michael Jackson at Oakfield. Love that song.’

‘Me too,’ says Camille.

But of course I already know that.

Canterbury, 1616–1617

Canterbury had been where many French Huguenots, people like myself and my mother, had settled. The Duke of Rochefort had indeed recommended that my mother move to either London or Canterbury, telling her that Canterbury – a ‘godly place’ – was very welcoming to outsiders seeking refuge. My mother had ignored that advice, seeking the quiet of Suffolk instead, and mistaking, fatally, quietness with security. But the advice had stayed with me.

So we moved to Canterbury.

We managed to find a warm, comfortable cottage, paying less in rent than we ever had in London. We were impressed by the cathedral and the clean air, but other things were a struggle. Not least, work.

No one paid for musicians in the inns and alehouses there, and there was no theatre work either. I resorted to playing in the street, which was only busy on days when crowds were gathering at the gallows in the market square.

Then, when the money became too tight (after all of two weeks) Rose and Marion, now nine, gained work selling flowers. Marion was such a miraculous musical Montaigne-quoting girl. I often spoke to her in French and she picked up the language, though Rose was a little bit uncertain about this, as if all this education was going to be another thing that would separate her from the masses and mark her difference.

Marion would sometimes walk around the room in circles, in her own world, humming songs softly, or making clicking sounds with her mouth to amuse herself. She often seemed somewhere else entirely and would stare longingly out of the window. Sometimes some invisible worry would crease her forehead that she would never tell me about. She reminded me a lot of her grandmother. The sensitivity and intelligence and musicality. The mystery. She preferred playing the pipe (a tin pipe bought for tuppence at the market) to the lute. She liked music ‘made of breath not formed from fingers’.

She would play the pipe in the street. She would walk along playing it. I remember, most of all, a wonderful Saturday morning – with the sun brightening the world – when Marion and I headed into town to the cobbler’s to get Rose’s shoes mended. While I was talking to the cobbler Marion stood outside and played ‘Under the Greenwood Tree’ on the pipe.

A few moments later, she ran in and held up a shining clean silver penny, as bright as day. She had a broad, rare smile on her face. I had never seen her so happy.

‘A lady just gave me this. I will keep this coin and it will give us luck, Father, you’ll see.’

However, our luck didn’t last long.

The very next day we were all out together as a family, on our way to church, when a group of teenage boys began mocking us.

They were laughing at me and Rose holding hands, and we stopped doing so, then looked at each other, ashamed of our shame.

Then our landlord, an old growling badger of a man called Mr Flint, started to ask things every time he collected the rent money.

‘Are you her son, or . . . ?’

‘So, your girl can speak French?’

And, with grim inevitability, things descended from there. Gossip gained life here too. We began to inhabit a world of whispers and sharp looks and cold shoulders. It was easy to think that even the starlings were chirping about us. We stopped going to church, to try to hide out of view, but of course this stoked the embers of suspicion even more. And instead of scratching words on our door, they scratched overlapping circles into the tree outside our house, to ward off the evil spirits we were thought to associate with.

One day at the market a man claiming to be a witchhunter came up to Marion and told her she was the child of a witch, a witch who kept her husband young for her own pleasure. And then the man told Marion that she too, as the progeny of a witch, must be a demon.

Marion had held her head high and arguably made things worse by telling the man that ‘a monster who meets a miracle would see a monster’. Which wasn’t quite Montaigne, but was certainly influenced by him. But shortly after the man had gone Marion cried her eyes out and she remained mute for the rest of the day.

Rose was almost sick with fear, her voice trembling, as she told me of the incident that evening, after Marion had woken from a nightmare and fallen back asleep.

‘Why can’t these maggots leave us alone? I’m so worried for her. For all of us.’

She had a tear in her eye, even as her face hardened. She had made a decision. It was a terrifying one.

‘We must go back to London.’

‘But we fled from there.’

‘It was a mistake. We will go. All of us . . . all of us . . . all of us.’ She kept saying those words, as if she was scared of the words that would come after, though they eventually came.

The tears streamed now. I held her and she held me back and I kissed the top of her head.

‘You and Marion will be for ever in danger so long as I am with you.’

‘There must be a way—’

‘There is no way.’

Rose smoothed her skirt and stared down at it. She closed her eyes and wiped them and inhaled courage. A cart rattled by on the road outside. She looked at me and didn’t say anything but the silence was its own message.

‘You aren’t safe with us, Tom.’

She didn’t say the other half of this. That they weren’t safe with me, but I knew she knew that too, and the knowledge was near enough to kill me. To be the danger I wanted to protect them from.

I said nothing. What could I say? I knew Rose could survive without me. I knew, in fact, it was more likely without me.

She was now able to look at me in the face. ‘It is not for myself. I am not scared for myself. I will not be truly alive without you. I will be a ghost that breathes.’

And that was it. That was the moment all hope disappeared.

Marion knew I was going away. It hurt her. I could see it in her eyes. But, as she tended to do with things that troubled her, she kept it inside.

‘You will be safe, my angel. People won’t ask questions any more. No one will mark your door. No one will spit at your mother. Nothing terrible will happen. I have to go away.’

‘Will you return?’ she asked, almost formally, as if I was already at a distance from her. ‘Will you come and live with us?’

The truth would have broken both our hearts, and so I didn’t offer it. I did what you sometimes have to do as a parent. I told a lie. ‘Yes, I will return.’

She frowned darkly, and then she disappeared into her room. A moment later she returned, clutching something in her fist.

‘Open your hand.’

I opened it and a penny dropped onto my palm.

‘My lucky coin,’ she explained. ‘You must keep it with you always, and, wherever you are, you must think of me.’

We decided to leave for London, unseen, at night. Coach travel from Canterbury to London was available to anyone with money, and we managed to find a coachman with good horses who could take us there for a little less than two shillings.

And later that night, Marion, the only child I have ever had, fell asleep on my shoulder in the coach. My arm was around her. Rose stared at me, her eyes glistening with tears in the dark, as I clutched the coin Marion had given me.

It was so hard, in the years after that. I thought of all the days we’d had together as a family, all jammed close like plums in a basket. I wish I could have taken those days and spread them out for ever. One afternoon with them a month for the rest of my life. I could cope if it was just one day a year, so long as there was a time with Rose and Marion in front of me. But the trouble with life was that it had to be lived consecutively.

I fell into a nocturnal existence.

My lute and fresh face were a big hit in inns, particularly the Mermaid Tavern where fresh faces were an exotic rarity. I began to lose myself in the pleasures of alcohol and whorehouses. The city was becoming more and more crowded, and yet it just made me feel lonelier and lonelier. All those people who stubbornly were not Rose and were not Marion. I knew they lived in Shoreditch, or at least that Shoreditch had been their plan, so I sometimes went there but could never see them.

Then, one day, in one of the plague years – 1623 – I saw someone I vaguely recognised walking by the river. A woman in her thirties, holding a sleeping baby boy in her arms. (Walking by the river was a popular pastime whenever the plague struck, as the river air was seen as plague-free, bizarrely, given all the corpses that ended up there.) It took me a moment to realise it was Grace, though of course it took her no time at all to recognise me.

She looked sad and lost; the fierce life force of the girl I had once known seemed now blunted.

She stared at me for a while. ‘You still look the same, and look at me, an old woman!’

‘You are not an old woman, Grace.’ And she wasn’t. Not in age. Not in skin. Yet, still, the sadness and weight in her voice made me feel like it was a lie. And then I heard a reason for this.

‘How is she?’ I asked, voicing a question I’d had inside my head, through every single moment I had been without her.

‘Rose has it,’ she told me.

‘Has what?’

Grace didn’t have to say. I knew from her face. I felt a horrible coldness sink into me, clearing everything away.

‘She wants me nowhere near her for fear I catch it too. She will only speak to me from behind her door.’

‘I need to see her.’

‘She will not let you.’

‘Has she spoken of me?’

‘She misses you. It was all she was saying. That she should have never sent you away. That everything bad that happened has happened because she sent you away. She has never stopped thinking of you. She has never stopped loving you, Tom . . .’

I felt the prick of tears behind my eyes. I stared at her sleeping son. ‘Where does she live now? Where is Marion? I would love to know about Marion.’

Grace looked a little sheepish, clearly not knowing if she should say. She only answered my first question.

‘Rose doesn’t want—’

‘I won’t catch it. I can’t. I would have caught it by now. I never catch anything.’

Grace thought, gently rocking her baby in the cool afternoon air. ‘All right, I will tell you . . .’

London, now

It is parents’ evening. I am sitting behind a table, having just taken my third ibuprofen of the hour, lost in a flashback. Thinking of that last conversation with Rose. That last time I saw her. No. Not thinking of it, actually living it, again, as I sit here in a hall with parents, all with smartphones in their pockets or hands. I am hearing her whisper, from when she lay in a bed less than five hundred metres from this hall.

There is a darkness that fringes everything. It is a most horrid ecstasy . . .

She had been talking of a hallucination, but the more those words echoed, the more it seemed like a statement on life.

‘It’s all right, Rose,’ I whisper to myself, like a madman, right there in the twenty-first century. ‘It’s all right . . .’

And then the other echo.

The one that reverberated day and night.

She was like you. You must try to find her. You must try to look after her . . .

‘I’m sorry, Rose. I’m sorry . . .’

Another voice breaks through. A voice from right now. A voice from across the table.

‘Are you all right, Mr Hazard?’

It is Anton Campbell’s mother, Claire. She is staring at me, confused.

‘Yes, yes, I’m fine. I was just . . . I’m sorry, I was just thinking of something . . . Anyway, you were about to tell me something. Please, go ahead.’

‘I want to thank you,’ she says.

‘Thank me?’

‘I have never seen Anton more engaged with his schoolwork than he is with history. He’s even been getting books out from the library. All kinds of things. It’s so good to see. He says you really make it come alive.’

It is tempting, of course, to tell her that her son’s friend had threatened to stab me, but I don’t. I actually feel a bit proud.

I can’t really remember feeling pride. I hadn’t felt like this since I helped Marion to read Montaigne and play ‘Under the Greenwood Tree’ on the pipe. Hendrich always said I should be proud of the work I do for the society, but I had only felt good on occasion, such as when I’d gone up to Yorkshire to help rescue Flora. Generally, though, the work for the society had been a bit tense, and at worst soul-destroying. This, though, is different. This feels good in a solid, sustainable kind of way.

‘I’d been so worried about him . . . You know, he was drifting a little. A boy. Fourteen. He was very lost in himself. Hanging out with the wrong crowd. Getting in a little late . . .’

‘Oh, really?’

‘Wouldn’t talk to me much . . . But now he’s really getting back on track. So thank you. Thank you.’

‘Well, he’s a very bright young man. His essays on the Second World War and the British Empire’s role in the slave trade were really good. He’s on track for As.’

‘He wants to go to university. And do history. Which, you know, these days . . . it’s going to be expensive. But I want him to go. Which is why I am working every hour God sends. And God sends some crazy hours. But he’s determined. He wants to go.’

I feel a swell of pride. This. This right here is why I wanted to become a teacher. To know that it is possible to change the world for the better, in however small a way.

‘That is a brilliant . . .’ I look over at one of the tables across the sports hall. Camille is between parents. I notice her take off her glasses and rub her eyes. She doesn’t look very well. She is staring down at the papers on her little table, trying to focus.

I bring my mind back to Mrs Campbell. Or try to. My mind is haunting me with images: Rose’s dead face, Marion with her book, a house being devoured by flames.

When the city had burned, in 1666, I took part in the firefighting efforts and contemplated walking suicidally into one of the burning shops that, before the blaze, lined either side of London Bridge.

‘Yes,’ I say, trying to reassure Mrs Campbell that I am listening. ‘Yes, I bet.’

Then, suddenly, and with no warning, Camille falls off her chair. Her ribs hit the side of the table on her way down to the floor. Then her legs start to spasm violently. She is having some kind of fit, right there on the floor of the sports hall in the middle of parents’ evening.

I had been conditioned, even before I had knowledge of the Albatross Society, not to get involved in the heat of the moment. To float through life with a cool detachment. But that doesn’t seem to work any more. Maybe that youngest version of my adult self was returning. The one which had jumped off a theatre gallery to protect Rose and her sister.

Before I know it I am there, right over her, as Daphne comes running. Camille’s whole body is jerking now.

‘Pull the table back!’ I tell Daphne.

She does so. Then she asks another member of staff to call an ambulance.

I hold Camille steady.

There is a crowd. Only this is a twenty-first century crowd, so everyone’s macabre fascination is tempered with at least the semblance of concern.

She stops convulsing, and comes around, her confusion delaying her embarrassment. For a minute or so, she says nothing, just concentrates on my face.

Daphne brings some water. ‘Let’s all give her some room,’ she says to the parents and staff. ‘Come on, guys and gals, let’s all step back a little . . .’

‘It’s okay,’ I tell Camille. ‘You just had a seizure.’

Just. That sounds terrible.

‘Where . . . where . . . I . . . ?’

She looks around a little. She gets up, on her elbows, then sits up fully. She is weak. Something has been taken from her. Along with Daphne I help settle her back in her seat.

‘Where am I?’

‘The sports hall.’ Daphne’s smile is reassuring. ‘You’re at work. At the school. It’s all right, lovely, it’s just a . . . You’ve had some kind of a seizure . . .’

‘School,’ she says sleepily, to herself.

‘An ambulance is coming.’ This is one of the parents, putting their iPhone away.

‘I’m okay,’ she says. She doesn’t seem in the slightest bit self-conscious. Just tired and confused.

She stares up at me, frowning, not understanding who I am, or maybe understanding too much.

‘You’re okay,’ I tell her.

Her eyes are fixed on me. ‘I do know you.’

I smile at her, then, with more awkwardness, at Daphne. And I gently tell her, ‘Of course you do. We work together.’ I then, perhaps foolishly, underline my point for the crowd. ‘The new history teacher.’

She is leaning back. She sips the water. She shakes her head.

‘Ciro’s.’

The name hits my heart like a hammer. Hendrich’s words, that day years ago in a hurricane-ravaged Central Park, come back to me. The past is never gone. It just hides.

‘I—’

‘You played piano. When I saw you the other day, at the pub . . . I . . .’

Two thoughts: I am dreaming. It is possible. I have dreamed of Camille before.

Or: maybe she is old too. Old, old, old. As in, ancient. An alba. Maybe somehow the photos I have seen on Facebook of her younger self have been photoshopped. Maybe this is what I had felt for her. Maybe this was the connection. Maybe I just have a sense of our exotic sameness. Or maybe she knows some other way.

The one thing I am sure of is that I have to stop her talking. If she carries on she not only risks exposing me, but herself. I feel for her. There is no point denying that any more. The lie I had told myself for so long – that I could exist without caring for anyone new – was just that. A lie. I have no idea why Camille was the one to make me realise this, but I can no longer deny I care for her. And, in caring for her, I feel an overwhelming need to protect her. After all, Hendrich has had people permanently silenced for less than a mutter in a school hall. If she knows about albas, and is talking about it in public, she is automatically risking more than my identity. She’s risking her life.

‘Just relax. We’ll . . . nous allons parler plus tard . . . I’ll explain everything. But quiet, now. I can’t tell you here. Please understand.’

She looks sleepy with the effort of sitting up. She stares at me, the confusion clearing. ‘Okay. I understand.’

I lift the cup of water and help her take a sip. She smiles at Daphne and the other concerned faces. ‘I’m sorry . . . I have a seizure every few months. It’s my epilepsy. They make me tired for a while. I’ll be fine. The tablets were meant to stop the seizures. So I probably need some new ones . . .’

She stares at me. Her eyelids seem heavy. She looks vulnerable and invincible all at once.

‘You okay?’ I ask her.

She gives a small nod, but looks almost as scared as I am.

Paris, 1929

It was around seven in the evening. Beside the vast empty dance floor, men in dinner jackets and women in low-necked tassel-fringed shift dresses and bobbed hair were drinking apéritifs and listening to the music I was playing.

Jazz was what Ciro’s was known for. But, by 1929, the sophisticated clientele didn’t just want jazz-jazz-jazz, because jazz was everywhere. So I sometimes mixed it up a little. Sometimes, if people were on the dance floor, I’d drop in an Argentine tango or some gypsy flavours, but early evening you could get away with playing anything soft and thoughtful, so I was playing some Fauré, from his melancholic period, and feeling every note.

‘Prétendez que je ne suis pas ici,’ the photographer had told me as I was playing.

‘Non,’ I whispered, remembering Hendrich’s no-photographs rule. ‘Pas de photos! Pas de—’

But it was too late. I had been so lost in the music he had been taking photos of me without my realising.

‘Merde,’ I whispered to myself, switching to Gershwin to try to better my mood.

London, now

We are in a smart gastropub in the new Globe Theatre.

I feel nervous. The reason isn’t the location. It is Camille herself. The mystery is terrifying. How does she know about Ciro’s? How could she? I am scared of all the answers I have thought of, and the unknown ones I haven’t. I am scared for her. I am scared for me. I am twitching and looking around like an ominous bird on a windowsill. But there is also another reason I am scared. I am scared because up until now I have been surviving.

I mean, I haven’t actively wanted to kill myself for a long time. The last time, precisely, was in a bunker near Tarragona in the Spanish Civil War when I placed a pistol in my mouth and prepared to blow my head off. Only by forcing myself to stare and stare at Marion’s lucky penny had I managed to keep my brains on the inside of my skull. But that was 1937. That was a long time of not actively trying to die.

I have recently thought I wanted out from Hendrich but maybe, actually, this was a mistake. Yes, I am ‘owned’ by Hendrich but there is a comfort in that. Free will might be overrated.

‘Anxiety,’ Kierkegaard wrote, in the middle of the nineteenth century, ‘is the dizziness of freedom.’

I had ached from the death of Rose for centuries, and that pain had faded into the neutral monotony of existing, and moving on before I had time to gather any emotional moss. I’d been able to enjoy music and food and poetry and red wine and the aesthetic pleasures of the world and that, I now realised, was perfectly fine.

Yes, there had been a void inside me, but voids were underrated. Voids were empty of love but also pain. Emptiness was not without its advantages. You could move around in emptiness.

I try to tell myself I am just meeting her for what she is going to tell me, and that I don’t have to tell her anything in return. But it is strange being here. Especially as it is here.

I haven’t been to this specific place since the day I jumped onto the stage from the musicians’ gallery. The day I landed on Will Kemp’s back and saw Manning again. It had been the day of another confession, of course, to Rose. And now I can feel the faint echo of that day, amid the polite middle-class theatre chatter and clinking of cutlery around me.

The famous image of Shakespeare stares up at me from the front of the menu. I used to think it looked nothing like him – the image being all forehead and bad hair and wispy beard and lobotomised expression – but now the eyes seem to be his eyes. Watching me, wryly, as I continue through life. As if it amuses him, watching the man he helped to escape that day carry on in an interminable endless living tragicomedy.

The waiter is here now and Camille is smiling up at him.

She is wearing a midnight blue shirt. She looks pale, a little tired, but also beautiful.

‘I would like the skate wing,’ she tells the waiter, pushing her glasses a little further up her nose.

‘Very good,’ says the waiter, who turns to me.

‘I’ll have the gnocchi in kale pesto.’

He takes the menus, and their portraits of my former boss, and I turn back to look at Camille and try to relax.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘About being a bit odd sometimes, at school.’

Camille shakes her head. ‘You really have to stop saying that. Incessant apologising is never an attractive trait.’

‘You’re right. The thing is, I really am quite bad, you know, with people.’

‘Ah, them. People. Yes, it’s hard.’

‘And I have a lot, sometimes, going on in my head.’

‘Join the club.’

‘There’s a club?’

‘No. There are too many people in clubs. But it’s fine. Be how you want to be.’

‘I haven’t been a very public person. I have had to be careful.’ I am sure, looking at her, that I have never known her. In this life of familiar patterns and people she has the wonderfully rare feature of not reminding me of anyone. But I have to ask. ‘We never met, did we? I mean, before I saw you that day in the park. I saw you once, from Daphne’s window, but we have never met before, have we?’

‘It depends what you mean by met. But, no, in the conventional sense, no.’

‘Okay.’

‘Yeah.’

There is a kind of stand-off. We both have more questions but we are carrying them in holsters waiting for the other one to fire away. A single sentence could render either of us insane.

We nibble on rye bread and harpoon olives with cocktail sticks.

‘How are you feeling?’ I ask. The tamest enquiry, but a sincere one.

She rips some bread apart and stares at it for a moment, as if a secret is there, contained like every element in the universe, inside the leavened dough.

‘Much better,’ she says. ‘I’ve had epilepsy for a long time. Used to be a lot worse.’

A long time.

‘So you’ve had lots of seizures before?’

‘Yes,’ she says.

The waiter tops up our wine. I take a sip. Then another.

Camille looks at me with forceful eyes. ‘Now you. You promised. I need to know your story.’

‘I want to tell you about myself,’ I tell her, still unsure of how much truth I will eventually reveal. ‘But there are some things that it is better for you – for anyone – not to know.’

‘Criminal things?’ I feel like she is teasing me.

‘No. I mean, well, there are a few of those as well. No. I am just saying if you knew about me there would be a very strong chance you would think I was insane.’

‘Philip K. Dick wrote that it is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.’

‘The sci-fi writer?’

‘Yes. I’m a geek. I like science fiction.’

‘That’s good,’ I say.

‘You like it too?’

No. I am it, I think to myself.

‘Some. Frankenstein. Flowers for Algernon.’

‘I want you to tell me about yourself,’ she says. ‘Tell me, at least, what you were going to tell me. Let me know if I am mad.’

It is tempting, right then, to put an end to it by saying you are mad. But instead I say, ‘Before I tell you about me, you have to tell me about you.’ I sound firmer than I had intended.

Wide eyes. ‘Do I?’

I inhale deeply. This is the moment. ‘I need to know how you recognised me. I need to know why you mentioned Ciro’s. Ciro’s closed eighty years ago.’

‘I am not that old.’

‘Exactly. I didn’t think so.’

A song comes on in the background. She tilts her head. ‘Ah, I love this. Listen.’

I listen. A warm, sentimental melody I recognise. It’s ‘Coming Around Again’ by Carly Simon.

‘My mother used to love Carly Simon.’

‘And Michael Jackson?’

‘That was just me.’

She smiles, and there is a moment of awkwardness when she realises it is her turn to explain herself. And in that moment I imagine being with her. Like I had in the pub. I imagine kissing her. I have an urge to run away and to get Hendrich to book me a plane and to disappear somewhere else, somewhere I will never see her again. But it is too late.

She is ready.

‘Right,’ she says. ‘Je vais m’expliquer.’

And she does.

She tells me she started having seizures when she was seven. Her parents safe-proofed the house. Soft carpets. Table corners blunted by glued-on napkins. Finding the right medication had taken a while. And she slowly became agoraphobic. ‘I was scared of life, basically.’

When she was nineteen she’d become engaged to a handsome, funny web designer called Erik – ‘with a K’, his mother was Swedish. This was the Erik I’d seen online. Facebook Erik. He had died in 2011 while rock climbing.

‘I was there. Not climbing, obviously. Rock climbing and seizures don’t go that well. But I was there. I was with some of our friends. There was a lot of blood. I didn’t see anything for months when I closed my eyes except blood. And now he was dead I thought, well . . . fuck it.’

She takes a few breaths. To talk about memories is to live them a little.

‘I was always worrying I could die at any minute. And I wanted to be like him, healthy, but then – bam – he turned out to be mortal too. And it was too much. I had to get out of there. I had to get out, so I went travelling. I knew I couldn’t live as a prisoner to my condition any more. Do you understand?’

Of course I did. ‘So what happened after that? How did things turn around?’

‘I travelled around South America for six months. Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Columbia. Chile. I loved Chile. It was amazing. But then, eventually, my money ran out, and so I went back to France and I couldn’t go back to Grenoble – just the memories, you know – so I went to Paris. I went around all the nice restaurants and hotels and I got a job at the Plaza Athénée. One of the snooty grand hotels. There was something calming about that work. You would be speaking to people all the time, all day, checking in, checking out, but there was never anything deep and meaningful to it, you know? There were never any questions about life stuff, so it suited me perfectly.’

This is it. I sense it. Anxiety tightens my chest as she continues.

‘And anyway, they had these photos, this exhibition in the lobby, of Golden Age Paris, all from the twenties. And lots were of jazz clubs, and of the boulevards, and Montmartre, and they had one of what’s her name . . . the jazz singer, the dancer, with the cheetah . . .’

‘Josephine Baker?’

As I say the name I remember watching her through a mist of cigarette smoke dancing the Charleston at the Century Club in Paris.

She nods quickly, makes a rolling motion with her hands, as if she is nearing her conclusion. I try to steel myself.

‘Yes. Josephine Baker. Anyway, the one I was facing, the one I looked at, day in, day out, was the largest one: of the pianist at a restaurant. The restaurant was called Ciro’s. It had the name Ciro’s in the photograph. And the photo was black and white but very good quality for the time, and the man looked so lost in the music he was playing, as he looked forward over the piano, ignoring all the people in the restaurant who were looking at him, and I became fascinated by this moment, this frozen moment . . . Because it seemed like there was something timeless about it. Something beyond time. And also, the man was handsome. He had nice hands. And a seriously brooding face. And he had this pristine white shirt on, but with his sleeves rolled up, devil may care, and there was this scar on his arm. This curved scar. And I thought it was okay to have a crush on this man because he was dead. Only he wasn’t dead, was he? Because he was you.’

I hesitate. Suddenly I have no idea what to do. I remember her staring at the scar on my arm in the pub and now I know why. It all makes sense.

It is ridiculous, given that I have brought her here to tell her the truth, but I am now scared of doing so. My instinct is to lie. I am, after all, quite a good liar. Smooth and natural. I should just laugh and look disappointed, and say it is a bit of a shame, because I thought for a minute that she had really recognised me, and that now I know she is joking. Photographs could lie. Especially photographs from the 1920s.

But I don’t do that. I suppose part of it is because I really don’t want her to be embarrassed. Another part of me, I think, wants her to know the truth. Needs her to.

‘So,’ she says, into my silence.

She then makes a kind of gesture that is hard to capture. She sticks her chin out a little and does a slight nod and closes her eyes and pulls her hair back behind an ear. It is a gesture of mild defiance. I don’t know what she is defying. Life? Reality? Epilepsy? It is over in two seconds but I think this is the moment in which I have to admit to myself that I am in love for the first time in four centuries.

It may seem strange, falling in love with someone because of a gesture, but sometimes you can read an entire person in a single moment. The way you can study a grain of sand and understand the universe. Love at first sight might or might not be a thing, but love in a single moment is.

‘So,’ I say, tentatively, testing how much she believes versus what she thinks she believes. ‘You not only like science fiction, you think I could be science fiction. You think I could be a time traveller or something.’

She shrugs. ‘Or something. I don’t know. I don’t know. I mean, any truth that people aren’t ready to believe sounds like science fiction. The earth going around the sun. Electromagnetism. Evolution. X-rays. Aeroplanes. DNA. Stem cells. Climate change. Water on Mars. It is all science fiction until we see it happen.’

I have that urge to get out of here, out of the restaurant. It is almost as strong as the urge to want to talk to her for all eternity. But not quite.

I clench my eyes closed, as if pressing forge-hot iron against my skin.

‘You can tell me. You can tell me the truth.’

‘I can’t.’

‘I know it was you in that picture.’

‘It was staged. The picture was staged. It wasn’t from the twenties.’

‘You’re lying. Don’t lie to me.’

I stand up. ‘I’ve got to go.’

‘No, you don’t. Please. Please. I like you. You can’t run away from everything.’

‘You’re wrong. You can. You can run and run and run. You can run your entire life. You can run and change and keep running.’

People stop chewing to look at me. I am making a scene. Again, here in Southwark. I sit back down in my chair.

‘I have the photo,’ she says. ‘I have it on my phone. A photo of a photo. But it’s good quality. I know that sounds weird. But if you don’t tell me, I will have this question in my head for ever and I will try and find other ways to answer it.’

‘That would be very unwise.’

‘Sounds exactly like me. I believe that every truth should be known. Do you see? Because I’ve lived with epilepsy and it’s a mystery. They know so fucking little about it. There is a truth and it isn’t known. We should know all the truths. Especially these days. And you promised. You promised if I came here you would tell me. If you don’t tell me I’ll keep asking questions.’

‘And if I tell you the truth and say you must not say a thing – even a hint of a thing – to anyone? What then?’

‘Then I will say nothing.’

I look at her face. You can tell only so much from a face. But I trust her. I have been trained, especially for the past century or so, not to trust anyone except Hendrich, and yet I trust her. Maybe it is the wine. Or maybe I am developing aptitude.

For a terrible, bewildering moment I know her completely. I know her as if I had spent whole lifetimes with her.

‘Yes, it was me. It was me.’

She stares at me for a while, as if at something slowly emerging from a mist. As if she hadn’t really been so sure before, as if she had wanted to be told it was all an elaborate illusion. I enjoy this look. I enjoy her knowing.

I will worry, later, about what I have just said. The truth that has passed between us. But right now, it is nothing but a release.

Our food arrives.

I watch the waiter disappear into the noise of the restaurant.

And then I look at her and I tell her everything.

Two hours later, we are walking by the Thames.

‘I am scared to believe this. I knew it was you. I knew it. But there is knowing something and knowing something. I feel like I may be mad.’

‘You’re not mad.’

There is a young man, near where the Cardinal’s Hat used to be, hopping about on a BMX to the delight of a crowd.

I look at Camille and see her intense seriousness juxtaposed with the happy tourists around us and I feel guilty, as if I haven’t just told her a secret, but infected her with my own emotional weight.

I had told her about Marion. And now I was taking the polythene bag holding her penny out into the light.

‘I remember the day she was given it. I remember times with her more than I remember things that happened a year ago.’

‘And you think she is still alive?’

‘I don’t know. It’s hard enough being a man and living for four hundred years. And no one ever thinks we’re witches or worries why we don’t have children. But I have always sensed it. She was a clever girl. She could read. She could quote Montaigne when she was nine. My worry is her mind. She was always a very sensitive child. Quiet. She would pick up on things. Get upset easily. She’d brood on things. Be lost in her own world. Have nightmares.’

‘Poor girl,’ said Camille, but I can see she is a bit dazed from all the information.

The one thing I haven’t told her about is the Albatross Society. I sense that even to talk about it is to endanger her somehow. So when she asks me if I know of any others like me, apart from Marion, I don’t mention Agnes or Hendrich. But I do tell her about Omai, my old friend from Tahiti.

‘I haven’t seen him since he left London. He went on Cook’s third voyage. Cook wanted him as translator. I never saw him again. But he didn’t come back to England.’

‘Captain Cook?’

‘Yes.’

She grapples enough with this that I don’t throw her with my stories about Shakespeare and Fitzgerald. Not just yet.

We talk some more.

She asks to see the scar again. She traces it with her finger, as if to make all this more real. I look out at the river, where Dr Hutchinson had been found, once upon a time, and I realise I need to tell her something.

‘Listen,’ I tell her, ‘you can’t tell anyone about this. I probably shouldn’t have told you. It’s just that you were asking lots of questions. You thought you knew me. And that thinking, that curiosity, was possibly more dangerous than knowing. So now you know, you’ll have to keep quiet about it.’

‘Dangerous? This isn’t the age of witches. Surely you could go public about this. Get DNA tests. Proof. It might be able to help people. Help, you know, science. Fighting illnesses. You said your immune system is—’

‘There is a history of bad things happening to people who know. Doctors who were about to publish evidence, and so on. They have had a habit of disappearing.’

‘Disappearing? Who made them disappear?’

The truth comes with its own lies. ‘I don’t know. It’s a shadowy kind of world.’

We talk some more, and keep walking. We walk over the Millennium Bridge and head east through the City. We are, informally, walking home. Our conversation is carrying us there.

It is an hour’s walk, but the weather is mild and neither of us fancy the underground. We walk past St Paul’s Cathedral, and I tell her how it used to be busier than it is today, and how the churchyard used to be the centre of the London book trade. Then we walk down a street called Ironmonger Lane and she asks me about it and I say that I used to walk down this same Ironmonger Lane on my way to Southwark, and that it used to live up to its name, with the whole road noisy and hot from the moulding of metal.

She lives further east than me. When I suggest that I should probably take Abraham for a walk and that she is welcome to come too, she accepts the invite.

We sit together on the bench where I first saw her. An empty carrier bag floats far over our heads like a cartoon ghost.

‘What are the main differences, over time?’

‘Everything you see. Everything you see is different. Nothing stays the same.’ I point to the creature darting up a tree. ‘That would have been a red squirrel once, not a grey one. And there wouldn’t have been carrier bags floating about. The sound of traffic was more clip-clopping. People looked at pocket watches, not phones. And smells, that’s the other thing. It doesn’t smell as much. Everywhere stank. Raw sewage and all the waste from the factories was pumped into the Thames.’

‘Lovely.’

‘It used to be severe. There was the Great Stink. It was eighteen fifty-something, around then. A hot summer. The whole city reeked.’

‘It’s still pretty stinky, though.’

‘Not even comparable. You used to live in stink. People never used to wash. People used to think baths were bad for them.’

She sniffs her armpit. ‘So I’d have been just about okay, then?’

I lean in and smell her. ‘Far too clean. People would have been very suspicious. You are almost twentieth-century clean.’

She laughs. It is the simplest, purest joy on earth, I realise, to make someone you care about laugh.

The sky begins to darken slightly.

‘So, you really had a crush on me?’

She laughs again. ‘You really sound immature, for a four-hundred-year-old.’

‘Ahem, four-hundred-and-thirty-nine-year-old.’

‘Sorry, a four-hundred-and-thirty-nine-year-old.’

‘Asking that question made you sound five.’

‘I feel five. Normally I feel my age but right now I feel five.’

‘Yes, if that is what you want to hear . . .’

‘I want to hear the truth.’

She sighs. Fake dramatic. Does that thing where she looks to the sky. I watch her in profile, mesmerised. ‘Yes, I had a crush on you.’

I sigh too. Mine is also a bit fake dramatic. ‘The past tense has never sounded so sad.’

‘Okay. Okay. Have. Have. I have a crush on you.’

‘Me too. On you, I mean. I find you fascinating.’

I am being totally sincere, but she laughs. ‘Fascinating? I’m sorry.’

Her laugher fades. I want to kiss her. I don’t know how to make that happen. I have been single for four centuries and have absolutely no idea of the etiquette. But I feel light, happy. Actually, I would be fine with this. This ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ moment. With a kiss forever a possibility. With her looking at me and me looking at her.

I realise I would like to solve the mystery of her just as much as she wants to solve the mystery of me and she nestles a little into me and I put my arm around her. Right there. On the park bench. Maybe that is what it takes to love someone. Finding a happy mystery you would like to unravel for ever.

We sit in silence for a while, like a couple, watching Abraham gallop around with a Springer spaniel. And I am enjoying the happy weight of her head on my shoulder, for two minutes or so. Then two things happen in quick succession. I feel a sudden pang of guilt, thinking of Rose. Of her head resting on my chest as we lay on her narrow bed in Hackney. Of course, Camille wouldn’t know this is what I am thinking, except that my body might have tensed a little.

And then my phone rings.

‘I’ll ignore it.’

Which I do. But then it rings again and this time she says, ‘You’d better see who it is,’ and I look at my phone and I see a single letter on the screen. H. I realise I have to get it. I have to do exactly what I would do if I wasn’t with Camille. So I answer it. And the moment, that brief moment of happiness, floats away like a bag on the wind.

I stand up from the bench, with the phone to my ear.

‘Is this a bad time?’, Hendrich asks.

‘No. No, Hendrich. It’s fine.’

‘Where are you?’

‘I’m walking the dog.’

‘Are you on your own?’

‘Yes. I’m on my own. Except for Abraham.’ I say this, I hope, quietly enough for Camille not to hear, and loud enough for Hendrich not to become suspicious. I think I fail on both counts.

A pause.

‘Good, well, listen . . . we have found someone.’

‘Marion?’

‘Alas, no. We have found your friend.’

I am confused by the word ‘friend’. I look at Camille, now frowning at me, still on the bench.

‘Who?’

‘Your man.’

I sincerely have no idea what he is talking about. ‘What man?’

‘Your Polynesian. Omai. He’s alive. And he’s being a fool.’

‘Omai?’

Even without Camille nearby, this news wouldn’t make me happy. Not because I am not interested in my old friend, but because I sense there can be nothing good from Hendrich finding him. It is very unlikely he wants to be found. The happiness of just one minute ago seems totally out of reach.

‘Where is he?’ I ask. ‘What’s the story?’

‘There is a surfer in Australia who looks just like a three-hundred-year-old portrait by Joshua Reynolds. He calls himself Sol Davis. He’s becoming a little bit too known in the surfing community. This good-looking thirtysomething going on three hundred and fifty. And people are talking about how he doesn’t age. People are talking about that. It’s in the online comments, for fuck’s sake. Someone saying, “Oh, that’s the immortal guy who lives near me who’s looked the same since the nineties.” He’s dangerous. People are getting suspicious. And apparently that’s not all. Agnes’ source in Berlin says they know about him. The institute. He could be in real trouble.’

The wind picks up. Camille rubs her shoulders, to mime to me she is cold. I nod and mouth the words, ‘I’m coming.’ But at the same time I know I must look like I am not hurrying Hendrich.

‘This is—’

‘You have a holiday coming up? A half-term?’

This is sounding ominous. ‘Yes.’

‘I can get you on a flight to Sydney. Straight through. Just a two-hour stop in Dubai. Some airport shopping. Then, Australia. Week in the sun.’

Week in the sun. He’d said the same before Sri Lanka.

‘I thought you said that was it,’ I say. ‘I thought you said I could have this life for the full eight years. No interruptions.’

‘You are sounding like a man with an anchor. You’ve no anchor.’

‘No. Not an anchor. A dog, though. I have a dog. Abraham. He’s an old dog. He won’t last the eight years. But I can’t just leave him.’

‘You can just leave him. They have dog sitters nowadays.’

‘He’s a very sensitive dog. He gets nightmares and separation anxiety.’

‘You sound like you’ve been drinking.’

I knew I couldn’t endanger Camille.

‘I had some wine earlier. Enjoying life’s pleasures. That’s the whole point, isn’t it? Isn’t that what you told me?’

‘On your own?’

‘On my own.’

Camille is standing up now. She is holding the lead. What is she doing? But it is too late. She is already doing it.

‘Come on, boy!’

No.

‘Abraham!’

The dog runs over to her.

Hendrich’s tone becomes steel. ‘Is that your anchor?’

‘What?’

‘The woman who called for Abraham. That’s your dog’s name, right?’

Hendrich has a thousand symptoms of old age. I curse that one of them isn’t hearing loss.

Camille clips on Abraham’s lead, then looks at me again. She is ready to go.

‘Woman?’

Now Camille is listening to me.

‘Who is it?’

‘No one,’ I say. ‘She is no one at all.’

The mouth I had just been dreaming of kissing is now agape with disbelief.

‘She?’ she whispers, but it is one of those whispers that is more a voiceless scream.

I don’t mean it, I mime.

‘It’s just someone I see in the park. Our dogs know each other.’

Camille is furious.

Hendrich sighs. I have no idea if he believes me or not, but he returns to his main subject. ‘If it isn’t you, there will still be someone seeing your old friend. A stranger. I have been recruiting quite heavily recently. This is what gives me faith I will find Marion. The point is: I have lots I could send, but they might not be able to persuade him, and then . . .’ His voice trails off. ‘So it is up to you. It is completely up to you.’

The myth of choice. Classic Hendrich. Either I go and talk to Omai, or Omai dies. That is essentially what he is saying. If it isn’t someone from Berlin who gets to him, it will be someone else. And, even more horribly, I know he is right. Hendrich may be a manipulator, but he very often has the truth on his side.

Camille has handed me the lead and now she is walking out of the park.

‘I’ll phone you later. I need to think about it.’

‘You have an hour.’

‘An hour. Fine.’

Once off the phone, I call to Camille. ‘Camille, wait. Where are you going?’

‘Home.’

‘Camille?’

‘Who was on the phone?’

‘I can’t tell you that.’

‘Just as you couldn’t tell her who I was.’

‘It wasn’t a her.’

‘I can’t do this, Tom.’

‘Camille, please.’

‘Fuck off.’

‘Camille?’

‘I pour my heart out to you and get close to you and imagine there is something between us for you to deny we know each other. Jesus fucking Christ. I could have ended up sleeping with you! That’s probably what you do. Manipulate people. I’m probably just like another dog for you to train.’

‘Abraham isn’t trained. Camille, please, wait—’

‘Fils de pute!’

She walks out of the park. I could follow her. Every atom of me wants to follow her. I could talk to her and explain about Hendrich. I could quite possibly make everything all right. But I stay standing there, on the grass, under a purple sky, with the day dying around me. I calculate that pissing her off is better than endangering her. It is a total conundrum. The only way to protect her is to have as little to do with her as possible.

I know I have already done too much damage. Hendrich has heard her voice. He could have detected a French accent.

Shit. This is what happens when you drink wine. And when you try to get close to someone. You get trapped. But it is the same trap I’ve been in since 1891. As always, it is Hendrich’s trap. I feel literally immobilised. I will never have a life. And now I have upset the first new person I have really cared about in what feels like eternity. Shit. Shit. Shit.

‘Shit.’ I tell it to Abraham too.

Abraham looks up, panting his confusion.

For centuries I have thought all my despair is grief. But people get over grief. They get over even the most serious grief in a matter of years. If not get over then at least live beside. And the way they do this is by investing in other people, through friendship, through family, through teaching, through love. I have been approaching this realisation for some time now.

But it is all a farce. I am not going to be able to make a difference to anyone else. I should stop being a teacher now. I should stop all attempts at conversation. I should have nothing to do with anyone. I should live in total isolation. I should go back to Iceland, doing nothing except the tasks Hendrich asks of me.

It doesn’t seem possible for me to exist and not cause pain – my own, or other people’s.

Abraham whimpers a little beside me, as if feeling my pain.

‘It’s all right, boy. Let’s go home.’

I put some biscuits out for Abraham and drink some vodka and sing Carly Simon’s ‘Coming Around Again’, repeating the title of the song until I think I’m going insane.

Seeing there is ten minutes before I must call Hendrich I click on YouTube and type in ‘Sol Davis’. I find footage of waves and a man in a wetsuit on a board, carving his way across the water.

It cuts to this same man coming out of the water and walking over the sand, addressing the camera, with a smile but also a frown, and he shakes his head.

‘Hey, man, don’t do anything with that,’ he says. He has an Australian accent and his head is shaven and he looks, in normal terms, nearly twenty years older but there is no doubt about it: it is Omai. I freeze the frame. His eyes stare straight at me, his forehead beaded with saltwater.

I pick up the phone, cradle it in my hand, go into ‘Recents’ and press my thumb on ‘H’.

Hendrich answers.

‘All right, Hendrich. I’ll do it.’